Dark Terminal Magic

Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Hans Fugal wrote:
>> Interesting. Yes and no. I have two boxes handy, one is an ubuntu 7.10
>> box with ncurses 5.6 and the other is a debian box with 5.5. The same
>> behavior on both, but really it makes since since TERM is set to xterm
>> or rxvt which do support bce, so naturally ncurses will use it instead
>> of drawing spaces or whatever workaround it would implement for a
>> terminfo that doesn't support bce. So I still need to find a magic
>> TERM setting for OS X, but it's sounding like maybe there is one to find.
>> Fiddling around, I found the "tack" tool, which apparently lets you
> interactively edit (for some definition of interactive) a terminfo file.
> I *think* I managed to create a variant of xterm with bce disabled, but
> I don't have OS X available to test the result.
>> While in my home directory, with TERM=xterm in my environment, I started
> tack and pushed:
>> n e e bce<Enter> w q q q y
>> This created an ASCII file called "xterm". Then I typed "tic xterm",
> which created ~/.terminfo/x/xterm. I assume ncurses prefers the
> terminfo in my home directory.
>> This is the first time I've seen this stuff. It's weird but efficient;
> I suppose that in theory I can solve all sorts of terminal compatibility
> bugs quickly this way. However, there's no way I'm going to remember
> much of it unless I write it down. Hence this email. :-)
>
Neat. Thanks for sharing. In the meantime I've been trying the other
terminals with strange names, and I've found that TERM=dtterm actually
works quite well. Aptitude, mutt, and screen are all happy.
--
Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the
right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- Johann Sebastian Bach